I want to try something new — and I’d love your thoughts.
I’m working on a longer Substack piece at the moment about productivity in the arts (which, to my mind’s eye, seems to be on a strange, steep and unacknowledged) decline. I hope to share it in the next few weeks, but I have the itch to publish something in the meantime.
So today, I wanted to share five things I’ve recently seen that I thought, well, were worth sharing.
These are mostly pieces of cultural debris I’ve pulled from the hurricane of my own recent internet use. There’s no real overarching theme — and none of them are designed to make you productive, happier or improve your life at all.
Here’s the ask — tell me what you think!
Let me know if this is fun and you’d like me to do this more often. Or if it’s just annoying, and you already have enough content shoveled at you each week. I promise my feelings won’t be hurt. (I might even still do it, even if you don’t like it.)
So without further caveat: five fun things to (maybe) put in your brain this weekend:
1. Vladimir Nabokov’s notes on other authors
Writers talking about writers is my own personal cocaine, so apologies if this one tickles me more than it should. These are all short, bullet-point takes of Nabokov’s pulled from his book Strong Opinions (there are four photo-panels in the original Tweet — posting one below).
Of course, I like this because it’s so, very Nabokov. At the same time, it’s also so emblematic of how great artists think about other artists. It isn’t just envy and admiration — there’s condescension, derision, pin-point jabs, and a not-quite subtle competitive edge, which may or may not be masking a deeper insecurity. (Harold Bloom wrote the Gospel on this.) The casualness with which he dismisses masters is something to be admired.
2. “30-year anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death” post — from his 31 year old daughter.
In my head, Kurt Cobain’s infant daughter is still, well, an infant. Turns out — she’s not! And on the 30th anniversary of his death, she wrote a (slightly New-Age-y but still) quite beautiful ode to the Nirvana frontman. I quote:
I wish I could’ve known my Dad. I wish I knew the cadence of his voice, how he liked his coffee or the way it felt to be tucked in after a bedtime story. I always wondered if he would’ve caught tadpoles with me during the muggy Washington summers, or if he smelled of Camel Lights & strawberry nesquik (his favorites, I’ve been told). But there is also deep wisdom being on an expedited path to understanding how precious life is. He gifted me a lesson in death that can only come through the LIVED experience of losing someone. It’s the gift of knowing for certain, when we love ourselves & those around us with compassion, with openness, with grace, the more meaningful our time here inherently becomes.
3. Curtis Yarvin on Gaza
If you don’t know who Curtis Yarvin is, don’t read his Wikipedia page. And if you do know who Yarvin is, you’ll understand why.
Yarvin’s thoughts on Gaza are, to put it mildly, probably some you haven’t heard! But underneath the endless irony, strange digressions, and, well, medieval sniff of the whole thing, I think you will catch a whiff of someone who genuinely thinks his way of thinking would lead to more peace. As he says in the opening:
I want this shambolic slaughter-circus to stop. I think every institution involved in it, from UNRWA to the UN to Hamas to the IDF to the State Department—needs its entire org chart liquidated by bunker-buster bombs, leaving not a single box to check. I think all these offices need to be ground into dust the size of the FTX trading team. And I think if the world knew what I think I know, this would already have happened.
As with anything Yarvin writes, you don’t read him because he’s correct or even worth engaging in a practical sense. You read him because he invites you to step well beyond the confines of our everyday debates. You read him to have a reaction, which, if inspected, will tell you more about yourself than whatever op-ed the New York Times is peddling today.
4. Random Vox piece on housing
Tl;dr, some people want to turn America’s abandoned malls into housing. Politically, I’m always suspicious of any solutions to our housing problem that don’t involve, well, building more housing. But the reason this piece intrigues me is because it seems to represent what I’ve come to regard as the outer bounds of our political thinking when it comes to our material world.
Something that often goes uncommented upon in all the housing crisis talk is our strange, collective loyalty to the world as we found it. Our major cities are essentially untouchable, as if they’re a part of the capital-N Nature we’re so desperate to preserve, rather than something our ancestors threw up (in total defiance of preserving whatever came before). The idea of even building a new city is universally mocked — as if that isn’t how all the cities we lived in came about!
Because we’re no longer allowed to touch the world we were born with (because god forbid someone bulldoze a charming Brooklyn brownstone), “innovative” policy consists of finding new ways to use our inherited environment — rather than grabbing a blowtorch and making a new one.
5. Two short (short) stories (stories?) from John Barth
John Barth died last week. (Ngl, thought he was already dead. Sorry, John!) I read Lost in the Funhouse in high school, thought it was utterly and totally awesome, and have proceeded to read nothing else by him since. (Again, sorry, John!) But these two little vignettes came across my timeline, and they were so playful and fun (in a way that reminds you of how playful and fun all language ultimately is) — plus, they reminded me quite a bit of my late friend and mentor Dean.
Enjoy:
That’s all for now. Thank you for reading, and please — let me know what you think!
(As an aside: I meant to keep the copy shorter beneath each bullet. And I meant to only include one link for each. But, well. Momentum took control!)